


it was only a kiss (how did it end up like this?)

by hamdeny (brooklynisosm)



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Best Friends, First Kiss, M/M, so this isn't sexual in any way it's just pure fluff, they are very small
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 15:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16600301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brooklynisosm/pseuds/hamdeny
Summary: in short: hamlet doesn't think before he speaks, and horatio doesn't mind





	it was only a kiss (how did it end up like this?)

**Author's Note:**

> title from Mr. Brightside because i love Mr. Brightside
> 
>  
> 
> my headcanon is that ham and horatio have been friends since they were kids. i KNOW they are supposed to have met at Wittenberg but give me this, okay? just l et me have lifelong best friends hamlet and horatio who had all their firsts together. im emo

It is spring and they are twelve and Hamlet is strangely anxious when he says, in a tone he wants to be casual, “Have you ever kissed anyone?”

Horatio’s brow furrows, and he looks confused for a second, like Hamlet is speaking a foreign language. “What?” A pause, where Hamlet feels too awkward to speak. Then: “No.”

“Me neither,” says Hamlet, ripping grass in his fist.

“Oh.” He seems surprised. Hamlet tries not to read into it.

The afternoon is warm and sunny, but the two boys sit in the shade with their backs pressed against a large, sturdy tree. Their tree, as they call it, because this is often where they meet or climb or sit to read. Hamlet leans his head back, touching the axis of it to the warm trunk. He looks up through the leaves. Little splashes of sun flicker with the breeze. An idea grows roots in his mind, though he fears it may destroy his soil.

“Why’d you ask?” Horatio asks, blinking at him through bottle-bottom glasses.

Hamlet shrugs. “There’s this girl that I like. Just made me think.”

He’s lying. There is no girl he likes, at least not in the kissing way. He has Ophelia who is very pretty but who he knows too well. And there are other girl-shaped people who he’d tentatively call  his friends, like Helena or Cordelia or Kat, but he doesn’t want to kiss them either. Still, the flame of curiosity persists, itching his lips.

“Who?”

“Huh?”

“Who do you like?”

“Oh, you know.” Hamlet gestures vaguely. “A girl.”

Horatio raises his eyebrows and laughs. “A girl,” he says, leaning back against the tree. “Okay.”

“What?”

“What what?”

“Why are you smiling at me like that?”

“Oh, you know,” Horatio says with a snort.

“That is _not_ how my voice sounds!”

They make eye contact and a second later dissolve into laughter.

“I guess I just thought, like, what if I try to kiss a girl and I do it wrong or I’m gross or something?” Hamlet muses, rolling side to side in the grass.

“Anyone kissing _you_ would enjoy it,” says Horatio with a sort of automatic tone. Hamlet looks at him and a bit of pink rises on his cheeks. “I mean, since you’re the prince and all.”

“But that’s the thing!” Hamlet sits up. “I don’t want her to like me just because I’m the prince. I want her to like me for me, yknow? And like, wanna kiss me because it feels… I don’t know. I don’t even know what a kiss would feel like. Nice, I guess?”

“Nice,” Horatio repeats. He removes his glasses and polishes them.

A thought occurs to Hamlet. A wild, reckless, yet genius thought. See, this is the thing about his brain. When he has an idea, the left side says it’s stupid and why would he even think that. And the right side says: let’s do it right now.

Apparently, the right side of Hamlet’s brain is winning today because he says, maybe too excitedly than he should, “I’ll kiss you!”

Horatio drops his glasses.

“I mean, we’re best friends, and both of us are boys, so like, it won’t be weird or make us like…  fall in love with each other or anything. And then we both get practice and get it out of the way. And like, it’s not like anyone would know about it.”

Horatio just stares at him.

Hamlet shrinks under those eyes, naked to the world in a way he rarely sees them. Maybe his great idea isn’t so great after all.

“I, I mean. We don’t have to,” he stutters out. “It was just a stupid-”

“Right now?”

“What?”

“Kiss, right now?”

“If… if you want to.” Hamlet’s hands are shaking a little. He doesn’t really know why.

Slowly, Horatio nods. He’s blushing underneath flyaway freckles.

“What do I do?”

“I think if you…” Horatio flushes a brighter shade. Hamlet’s cheeks must also be red. “If you put your hand on… on my face, on my cheek, I- people like that. And then you won’t miss.”

“Huh?”

“You know, like, hit noses or something.”

“Oh.” Hamlet moves a hand gently out- his the pads of his fingers brush a bit of Horatio’s skin and the other boy gives a shuddery breath. Hamlet is mesmerized by his own hand as it moves to cup Horatio’s jaw, a little softness of his cheek under Hamlet’s thumb. “Like that?”

“Mhm.”

“What now?”

“Then you, uh, you, you kiss me. Her.”

Hamlet’s pulse stirs faster, blood rushing in his ears.

“Now?”

Horatio blinks up at him with a completely red face. “Okay.”

Hamlet leans in and with a surprisingly easy motion, touches his mouth to Horatio’s. It’s barely a kiss, more just a warm and a bit weird-feeling brush of lips but. It’s nice. Something in him is scared to keep doing it, though he likes it. He pulls away.

Horatio stares at him, letting out a long, shaky sigh.

“Was that good?” Hamlet says, a strange anxiety worming around in his chest.

Horatio only nods.

They stare at each other for a long time. 

Hamlet reaches to where Horatio's glasses still lay in the grass, temporarily abandoned. He slides them back onto Horatio's face. He'd hoped it would loosen the knot of something that lies in the air between them, but something just becomes tighter.

“Ok, first kiss done,” says Hamlet, with a nervous giggle.

Horatio rolls his eyes. Hamlet does the only thing he can think of and hugs him, hard, and they roll into the grass, laughing, and faintly aglow, and they don’t talk about it again until years later, when the thing between them becomes impossible to ignore.

**Author's Note:**

> should i continue with what happened next because i Definitely Will


End file.
